Raspberry Pi Cardboard Case

So, my Raspberry Pi came in the mail a little while ago (for those of you who don’t know, The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and keyboard, and which costs between £15 and £25. It can do most of things you’d expect of a computer, but is mainly being targeted towards the educational environment, and perhaps most importantly, I’m currently writing a book about programming games on it for kids.) As this was one of the early ones, it came without a case. So my first task was to find it one (a good resource for cases is the Raspberry Pi Wiki). After a bit of googling, I found my pi’s ideal home in the Pibow.

However, as they hadn’t actually started manufacturing them yet, I still needed something for the interim. A fairly obvious candidate for temporary protection lay in the box it came in; after all, it had been sturdy enough to survive Royal Mail, so a case made out of it should stand up well to life on my desk.

A few clicks later and I had myself a template (nb if you are going to print and use the template, make sure you have your pdf viewer set to print the page the actual size and not to do any scaling, else the Pi won’t fit!), and after about ten minutes of knife work, I had myself a case 🙂

All that remained was to fit the Pi inside, a fairly simple task,

And give it a quick test.

I’m not sure there is that much to say about the case itself. It works. It doesn’t require any glue, so it is easy to get the pi in and out of. I probably should take a hole punch to it to create some ventilation, but I haven’t had any problems with it overheating as yet, so why bother? One thing I will do at some point is decorate the poor thing, as it does look a tad dull. Now, where did I put those acrylic paints…